Religion: Evanston Irenicon

A church with 8,000,000 communicants, 20,000,000 constituents, 29,000 ministers, an operating budget of $100,000,000 per year and property worth a billion dollars would be the mightiest Protestant church in the U. S. Such a united church has long been the holy dream of U. S. Methodists who first attempted to make it come true by appointing a commission in 1918. Last week in Evanston, Ill., ten bishops and 40 ministers and laymen agreed upon an irenicon which they publicly hoped would result in a merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Protestant Church which split off in 1828 because of doctrine and administration, and the Methodist Episcopal Church. South which angrily broke away in 1845 because of slavery.

During four days of deliberations the Northern delegation was headed by leonine Bishop William Eraser McDowell, retired, of Washington. Bishop Edwin DuBose Mouzon of Charlotte, N. C., led the Southerners. The Methodist Protestants were headed by their president, Dr. John Calvin Broomfield of Pittsburgh. Also on hand to help along the cause of church peace & unity were such irenic Southern Bishops as John Monroe Moore of Dallas, William Newman Ainsworth of Macon, Arthur James Moore of San Francisco, Paul Bentley Kern of Greensboro, such irenic Northern Bishops as Frederick DeLand Leete of Omaha and Edwin Holt Hughes of Washington.

What the planning committee offered, and what the Evanston meeting unanimously agreed to present to their churches for ratification was:

A Name—The Methodist Church.

Conferences. The three churches would keep their separate annual conferences, would join together in a new general conference. Incumbent Northern and Southern bishops would retain their posts. The Methodist Protestants would accept two bishoprics, thus signifying that they no longer object to the Episcopacy as they did in 1828. Set up would be six jurisdictional conferences which would elect their own bishops. Purely geographical, five of the conferences would be called the Northeast, Southeast, North Central, South Central, Western. The sixth would innocently be called Central, would embrace 300,000 Negro Methodists, regardless of geography.

Jim Crowism. Over this Central Conference of blacks, liberal Northern Methodists fought tooth & nail against Southern Methodists. Said Bishop Mouzon: “We intend to give the Negroes more than they ever had before.” It was agreed that white conferences with Negro members (i.e. in the North) could keep them. Behind closed doors Negro Bishop Robert E. Jones (Northern Methodist) of New Orleans made a valiant attempt to make an issue of Equal Rights. Negro President Willis J. King of Gammon Theological Seminary, who was reported to have been promised a bishopric, said nothing. Finally, in public, everyone sighed with relief when Bishop Jones arose, said that the segregation plan was acceptable to his people.

Since over the next six years it will take a three-fourths majority in each Methodist general conference to get the plan ratified, observers believed that unrealistic, idealistic Northern Liberals could, and probably would, hold up Methodism’s mighty merger on the “Jim Crow principle.”